Cheap, effective and sold on the Internet, gps jammer are ideal for tech geek terrorism. Experts warn that a few jammer, strapped to remote control planes and launched over a major city, could sow plenty of panic: disrupting ATM withdrawals, air traffic controllers, ambulance routes and cell phones.
GPS disruption isn’t limited to jamming, either. There are increasing reports that the Russians have been expanding their ability to spoof the system’s signals, point receivers at the wrong locations. In June 2017, we reported on the U.S. Maritime Administration’s report about such incidents in the Black Sea in which ships’ navigation equipment was showing their location miles inland. Other reports of location errors had earlier cropped up in Moscow among players of the popular cell phone game Pokemon Go, which relies on a mobile device’s GPS-enabled location services.
Air Force Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, would only describe the devices given to the Iraqis as “jammers.” Dorrian has previously said that U.S forces advising and training the Iraqis have their own jammers to counter drones.
An apparently different type of anti-drone weapon spotted in Iraq is DroneDefender, made by Battelle, which resembles an assault rifle but features a directed energy frequency jammer mounted on the frame. It has a range of about 400 yards and works by disrupting the links to the drone controller or GPS device.
The GPS signal jammer works by sending out its own signal on the same frequency as the GPS unit, a noisy signal that prevents it from receiving or transmitting any useful information, either in bursts of sound or a continuous wave.
Russia has very advanced capabilities to disrupt GPS. Over 250,000 cell towers in Russia have been equipped with GPS jamming devices as a defense against attack by U.S. missiles. And there have been press reports of Russian GSM jammer in both Moscow and the Ukraine. In fact Russia has boasted that its capabilities “make aircraft carriers useless,” and the U.S. Director of National Intelligence recently issued a report that stated that Russia and others were focusing on improving their capability to jam U.S. satellite systems.